October 21, 20226
“Supply Chain Commons: Organic Waste, Climate Change and Regenerative Farming in Peri-Urban Sydney” explores how new socio-ecological relationships can be built around waste through collaborative, practice-based experimentation. Centered in Sydney, Australia, the project traces how spent coffee grounds (SCG) move from inner-city cafés to regenerative farms through what the authors call a “supply chain commons”—a distributed alliance that coordinates material flows and shared knowledge across urban and peri-urban space.
The chapter begins from the context of Australia’s climate and waste “polycrisis”: escalating droughts, bushfires, and floods alongside the collapse of export-based recycling markets. Although the circular economy—popularized globally by actors such as the Ellen MacArthur Foundation—is often framed as a pathway to “green growth,” Healy, Cohen and Lopes argue that mainstream circularity has been narrowed to technical efficiency and market expansion. In practice, landfill remains cheaper than diversion, and large-scale waste-to-energy projects risk reproducing extractive logics under a circular label.
Against this backdrop, Healy, Cohen and Lopes propose reframing waste as a commons. Drawing on the legacy of Elinor Ostrom but extending it beyond traditional resource governance, they suggest that commoning involves not only shared rules for managing resources but also shared ways of knowing, valuing, and caring. Waste must first be re-seen before it can be re-circulated.
The empirical core of the chapter is a collaborative workshop held at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). Participants included regenerative farmers, coffee roasters, café managers, a social enterprise waste hauler, local government representatives, and researchers. A four-metre supply chain map placed on the floor became a shared surface for negotiating flows of material (SCG, trucks, storage sites, farmland) and flows of information (weights, volumes, Environmental Social and Governance reporting metrics, soil data). Participants articulated different measures of value: farmers emphasized volume and soil vitality; haulers focused on weight and regulatory thresholds; roasters highlighted storytelling and brand identity; university representatives foregrounded cost savings, research value, and institutional commitments. The workshop surfaced these heterogeneous valuations and made them available for coordination.
Crucially, Healy, Cohen and Lopes argued that the supply chain commons that emerged depends as much on a knowledge commons as on compost itself. Waste became legible as information—data about landfill diversion, carbon sequestration, employment generation, and soil health. The co-production and circulation of this information allowed actors to align around shared commitments while maintaining distinct institutional roles.
Over time, the collaboration evolved into a proto-organization called Ground to Ground (GtG), intended to act as a custodian of the alliance. Its role includes coordinating logistics, developing shared norms, managing data flows, and mediating emerging tensions. The current initiative remains patchy, provisional, and iterative. To make these practices durable over time, participants are currently experimenting with legal forms—for example, drafting contracts for donation agreements and service arrangements that clarify roles and expectations as well as drafting a shared agreement to pool and circulate data across participants that establishes an informational commons alongside mechanisms of mutual accountability. But to make this process of commoning cohere, participants are acutely aware that they need more than new ways of setting informal and formal legal rules, as Ostrom suggests. They also need to cultivate new ways of measuring and knowing waste alongside a different sense of how we connect to the world and one another.
For the full article, see: SSRN available at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5254825
Amy J. Cohen is the inaugural Robert J. Reinstein Chair in Law at Temple University, whose scholarship centers on alternative dispute resolution, informal justice systems, and the law and political economy of agriculture and food.
Stephen Healy is an Associate Professor of Geography and Urban Studies at Western Sydney University and a member of the Institute for Culture and Society
Abby Mellick Lopes is a social design expert and Associate Professor in Design Studies at the University of Technology Sydney, whose interdisciplinary research advances the role of design in addressing climate change and fostering more sustainable, socially just futures.